For Shirley F. Keen.—J.G.
For my first grandchild, Akasha (a.k.a. Pumpy)—O.B.
CONTENTS
1King William Island, 29 June 1981
Appendix One: List of the officers and crews of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror
Appendix Two: Major expeditions involved in the search for HMS Erebus and HMS Terror
Foreword
THE EARLY HISTORY of European exploration in the Arctic was dominated by a single theme. Those who mimicked the ways of the native people—fur traders such as Alexander Mackenzie and Samuel Hearne—achieved great feats of discovery. Those who failed to do so—naval officers, for example, who viewed the quest for the Northwest Passage as but dangerous sport pitting British pluck against the elements—more often than not suffered terrible deaths.
Sir John Franklin, whose initial travels through the barren lands of Keewatin taught him a great deal about the ways of the Inuit, evidently failed to transfer such knowledge to his ill-fated Arctic command of 1845. Long after his own death on board the HMS Erebus in June of 1847, remains of his crewmembers were found far to the south, where they perished during a desperate quest for survival. Their shriveled remains were found in leather traces. They died dragging behind them an oak and iron sledge built in Manchester and weighing several hundred pounds. On it was a dory with all the personal effects of British naval officers, including silver dinner plates and even a copy of the novel The Vicar of Wakefield. Somehow they expected to haul this unwieldy load across the frozen wastes several hundred miles to possible rescue.
Not one of the 129 men who sailed with Franklin in 1845 survived. It was the greatest disaster in the history of Arctic exploration, and it gave rise to a mystery that would haunt the British for generations until finally the truth emerged in the wake of the events so powerfully chronicled in this elegant book. Frozen in Time is a story of mystery and adventure, an account of maritime sleuthing and discovery worthy of the pen of the great Victorian master of intrigue, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Like many great tragedies it begins in a sea of pride and blinding ambition.
The search for a polar route to Asia, which started during the reign of Elizabeth I with the voyages of Martin Frobisher, William Baffin, John Davis and Henry Hudson, had by the 19th century grown into an epic quest, a mission of redemption and destiny for a seafaring nation that, against all odds, had emerged triumphant from the Napoleonic Wars. For young officers in a peacetime navy—men such as Franklin, John Ross and William Edward Parry—the only route to advancement and promotion lay in exploration.
In 1818 the Admiralty dispatched two expeditions to the Arctic. Franklin went north, second in command of two ships with impossible orders to traverse the North Pole and descend upon the Beaufort Sea. John Ross and William Edward Parry went west into Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound, the actual mouth of the passage. They sailed on until Ross discerned a range of mountains blocking the horizon, a ridge that no one but he could see. Returning to England, ridiculed for his folly, Ross yielded command of the second voyage to Parry, who in 1819 managed to sail all the way to Melville Sound, crossing the meridian of 110 degrees west, allowing him to lay claim to a prize of £5,000, a small fortune at the time. In a season of limited ice, the likes of which would not be known in the Arctic for decades, he came tantalizingly close to victory. Only the permanent pack ice of McClure Strait kept him from reaching the open waters of the Beaufort Sea. Parry’s experience led many to underestimate the enormity of the challenge. In the end his very success would lure scores of seamen to their deaths.
Even as Parry in 1819 made plans for a winter in the ice, Franklin set out overland from Hudson Bay to map the Arctic coast. Before he could explore he needed to learn to walk in snowy conditions